Wonder Boys (13 page)

“How long have she and Q. been going at it?” I said.

“Too long for Q., I think,” said Crabtree, shaking his head. “Look at him.”

“I know it,” I said. “Poor bastard.”

I attempted to ignore the ivy fingers of desire for Hannah Green that climbed along my spine as I watched her dance.

“Hey,” said Crabtree, “look at that guy.”

He pointed to a table just at the edge of the dance floor.

“Who? Oh my.” I smiled. “The one with the hair sculpture.”

He was a small man, with delicate cheekbones and an amazing, radiant, processed pompadour, a cresting black tidal wave of hair atop his head. Many of the great hairdos of bygone ages, I’d found, survived to this day in isolated pockets of Pittsburgh. The guy was also wearing an elaborate velour warm-up suit, piped and embroidered with gold and crimson ribbon, and he was puffing on a long, thin cigar. His hands were too large for the rest of him, and you could see bright pink traces of some ancient injury puckered around the right side of his face.

“He’s a boxer,” I said. “A flyweight.”

“He’s a jockey,” said Crabtree. “His name’s, um, Curtis. Hardapple.”

“Not Curtis,” I said.

“Vernon, then. Vernon Hardapple. The scars are from a—from a horse’s hooves. He fell during a race and got trampled.”

“He’s addicted to painkillers.”

“He has a plate in his head.”

“He lost a toe to sugar diabetes.”

“He can’t piss standing up anymore.”

“He lives with his mother.”

“Right. He had a younger brother who was a—trainer.”

“A groom.”

“Named Claudell. Who was retarded. And his mother blames Vernon for his death.”

“Because, because, because Vernon let him—groom some mean stallion—and he got his head stove in. Or—”

“He was killed,” said a sleepy voice, “when a gangster named Freddie Nostrils tried to shoot his favorite horse. He took the bullet himself.”

We both turned to look at James Leer, who opened one bloodshot eye to regard us.

“Vernon, over there, was in on the hit.”

“That’s very good,” said Crabtree, after a surprised moment. We watched as the eye closed once more.

“He heard what we were saying’ I said.

Working on his sixth or seventh bottle of Iron, Crabtree did not look overly concerned by this. I took another few sips of poison from my shot glass. After a few minutes the silence between us seemed to have taken on an insufferable weight.

“Poor old Vernon Hardapple,” Crabtree said, sorrowfully shaking his head. He smiled. “They always come out sounding so unlucky.”

“Every story is the story of somebody’s hard luck,” I said, quoting the silver-haired cowboy writer in whose class we had met twenty years before.

“Hey, teach,” said Hannah Green, bounding toward us in her sharp red boots. “I want you to come and dance with me.”

W
E DANCED, TO
“Shake a Tail Feather,” and “Sex Machine,” and some scratchy Joe Tex number whose title I couldn’t recall. I danced with Hannah until the band came off break, and as they climbed up onto the platform and got behind their various instruments I went back over to the table and hit up Crabtree for another codeine and a couple of whatever else he was selling. I needed something for my ankle, and something else for my sense of shame—don’t think I didn’t feel ridiculous, thrashing around out there like one of Picasso’s wounded minotaurs, lumbering blindly after an angelic young girl. Crabtree had managed to revive James Leer, for the moment, and they were engaged with old Q. in an apparently intricate consideration of the function or meaning of the cockatoo in
Citizen Kane
. Crabtree was by no means a film buff but he had an excellent memory for narratives and his gothic imagination found much to appreciate in the work of my girth brother Orson Welles. Or at least that was the impression he wanted to give James Leer. Under the cold and inescapable gaze of Q. or his doppelgänger, Crabtree held out to me a palmful of blue grapeshot, pink moons, gray goldfish, little white pentagons shaped like tiny home plates.

“Christ, your hand looks like a bowl of Lucky Charms,” I said. “Let me try one of those white ones.”

I washed it down with something roiling around in a shot glass on the table in front of Crabtree that stank of ketones and aldehydes and that I thought might have been bad tequila. Then I went back out onto the floor and danced for another hour to what grizzled old Carl Franklin called the R & B stylings of Pittsburgh’s very own Double Down, until I could no longer feel my ankle and had lost the better part of my shame. Hannah rolled up her sleeves, and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her flannel shirt, revealing the threadbare neckline of a white ribbed undershirt and a filigreed locket on a thin silver chain.

While she danced she kept her eyes closed and described solitary, interlocking circles across the floor, so that there were moments when I felt that she wasn’t really dancing with me at all, but simply employing me as a kind of fulcrum, a hub on which to hang the whirling spokes of her own private revolutions. And no wonder, I thought; if I were her I certainly wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think that I could possibly have chosen such an elephantine piece of machinery as myself, all vacuum tubes and gear work with a plain old analog dial of a face, such a dented, gas-guzzling old Galaxie 500 of a man, for a dance partner. But then she would open her eyes, favor me with her spacious Utah smile, and give me her hands, so that I could spin her for a second or two. Whenever our faces drew within each other’s orbit I felt compelled to speak, generally to express my doubts about the wisdom of my dancing, with her, at all, and when Double Down broke their set again I was relieved, and I started for the table. But she took hold of my wrist, dragged me over to the magic black telephone, and dialed up three songs.

“‘Just My Imagination,’” she told the operator, without consulting the tattered playlist. “‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ That’s right And ‘Get It While You Can.’”

“Uh oh,” I said. “I’m in trouble.”

“Hush now,” said Hannah, as she reached up and put her arms around my neck.

“I’m going to regret this tomorrow,” I said.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Everybody ought to have a hobby.”

A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I’d never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair. Somewhere in the middle of Percy Sledge’s testimony the combination of substances I’d introduced into my bloodstream in the course of the evening reached a kind of equilibrium, and I forgot, for a moment, all the bad things that had already happened to me that day as a result of my foolishness and bad behavior, and all the good reasons I had for leaving poor Hannah Green alone. I was happy. I kissed Hannah’s apple yellow hair. I could feel them unlimbering the old siege engine down inside my boxers. I think that I must have sighed, then, and for all the fizz and ichor flowing at that moment through the ventricles of my heart, it must have come out sounding unutterably sad.

“I’ve been rereading
Arsonist
,” she told me, to cheer me up, I supposed. “It’s so great.” She was referring to my second novel,
The Arsonist’s Girl
, an unpleasant little story of love and madness I’d written during the Final Days, down inside the doomed bunker of my second marriage to a San Francisco weatherwoman whom I’ll just call Eva B. It was a slender book, whose composition had cost me a lot of misery, and I had a pretty low opinion of it, myself, although it did contain a nice description of a fire at a petting zoo, and a pretty good two-page sex scene in which my reader was given a taste of the heroine’s rectum. “It’s so fucking tragic, and beautiful, Grady. I love the way you write. It’s so natural. It’s so plain. I was thinking it’s like all your sentences seem as if they’ve always existed, waiting around up there, in Style Heaven, or wherever, for you to fetch them down.”

“I thank you,” I said.

“And I love what you wrote in your inscription, Grady.”

“I’m glad.”

“Only I’m not quite the downy innocent you think I am.”

“I hope that isn’t true,” I said, and at that moment I happened to catch a glimpse, in the smoky mirrored wall of the Hi-Hat, of an overweight, hobbled, bespectacled, aging, lank-haired, stoop-shouldered Sasquatch, his furry eye sockets dim, his gait unsteady, His arms enfolded so tightly around the bones of a helpless young angel that it was impossible to say if she was holding him up or if, on the contrary, he was dragging her down. I stopped dancing and let go of Hannah Green, and then Janis Joplin ceased urging us not to turn our backs on love, and the last of Hannah’s requests came to an end. In its aftermath we stood there, suddenly abandoned by the other couples, looking at each other, and all at once, as the pills and the whiskey fell out of balance in my bloodstream, I felt irremediably fucked up.

“So what are you going to do?” said Hannah, giving my belly a friendly slap.

My reply was something softheaded and mumbled about dancing with her all night.

“About Emily, I mean,” she said, a little impatiently. “I—I guess she isn’t going to be there when you get home.”

“I guess not,” I said. “Try not to look quite so pleased.”

She blushed. “Sorry.”

“I guess that I really don’t know. What I’m going to do.”

“I have an idea,” she said. She fished around in the pocket of her jeans for a moment, and then pressed three warm quarters into my palm.

I steered myself over to the telephone, dropped in the quarters, and unhooked the receiver.

“You’ve got to help me,” I said.

“Who is this?” said the voice of the thousand-year-old lavender-haired Ruthenian woman in cat-eye glasses and an angora sweater who dwelt within the secret heart of Pittsburgh, taking the requests of an ever-dwindling population of drunken and heartbroken lovers. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I said I need to hear, something that’s going to save my life,” I told her, reeling on the end of the telephone cord.

“This is a jukebox, hon,” said the woman, sounding calm and a little distracted, as though wherever she was the television was playing low or she had a copy of
Cosmo
spread open on her ancient lap. “This isn’t a real telephone you’re talking on.”

“I know that,” I said, unconvincingly. “I just don’t know what to ask you for.”

I looked over at Hannah and tried to flash her the smile of a competent and reasonable smiler, of someone who wasn’t at all worried that he was going to be sick, and going to fall down, and going to hurt yet another young woman in the course of a lifelong career of callous disregard. Judging from the look of dismay that came over her face, I thought I must have failed miserably, but then I saw that Q. had left the table and was making his way across the crowded room toward Hannah, his face grim and determined and haunted, as far as I could see, only by alcohol, the writer’s true secret sharer, the ghost that lived in the dusty, bare corners of Albert Vetch’s and so many other midnight lives. As he approached, however, to ask her for the next dance, Hannah turned on him, simply, and headed straight toward me, head lowered, blushing from her forehead to the nape of her neck at the thought of her own rudeness.

“Just a minute,” I told the Jukebox Crone, wrapping my hand around the mouthpiece of the receiver. “Dance with him, Hannah.” I tried out another of my implausible smiles. “He’s a famous writer.” I raised the telephone to my mouth again. “Are you still there?” I said.

“Where would I go?” said the woman. “I told you, hon, I’m not a real person. This is my job.”

“But I don’t want to dance with him, Grady.” Hannah put her arm through mine and looked up at me through her scattered bangs, searching my face, her eyes so wide and desperate that I was alarmed. I’d never seen Hannah acting anything other than the calm, optimistic Mormon girl she was, eternally polite, capable of stolid acceptance of locusts, misfortunes, and outlandish news about the universe. “I want to keep dancing with you.”

“Please.” I watched as Q. turned and walked with drunken precision back to the table in the far corner of the room, arriving just as the heads of James Leer and Crabtree surfaced into the pink beam of a floodlight from the bottom of a very deep kiss. James’s eyes had gone all blind and his mouth was an empty O.

“I’m sorry,” I said into the telephone, “but I have to hang up now.”

“All right, all right,” said the woman. She gave a curt little sigh and tapped her seven-inch tropical pink fingernails against her headset. “How about ‘Sukiyaki’?”

“Perfect,” I said. “And why don’t you pick another two that you like?”

I hung up the phone, gave Hannah a sloppy and inarticulate hug, and apologized to her about forty-seven times, until neither of us knew what I was talking about and she said that it was all right. Then I hurried over to the table in the corner, where I laid my cold fingers against James Leer’s feverish neck.

“In ten seconds,” I told them, as I helped James to his feet, “this dance floor is going to be packed.”

H
ANNAH SAID THAT
she had never been there but she believed James Leer rented a room from his Aunt Rachel, in the attic of her house in Mt. Lebanon. Since neither of us felt like driving all way the out to the South Hills at two o’clock in the morning, I folded James into Hannah’s beat-to-shit Le Car and sent them on home to my house. Crabtree and Q. would be riding with me. I figured it would be safer that way for all of us.

As I was about to close the door on him, James stirred and wrinkled up his face.

“He’s having a bad dream,” I said.

We watched him for a moment.

“I’ll bet James’s bad dreams are
really
bad,” said Hannah. “The way bad movies are.”

“Xylophones on the soundtrack,” I said. “Lots of Mexican policemen.”

James lifted a hand to the general vicinity of his right shoulder and patted it a few times, without opening his eyes, then pawed in the same way at his left shoulder, as if he thought he were home in bed and had lost track of his pillow.